Wednesday, January 20 - up through early afternoon, and I want stress that point - brought the nation the sigh of relief and the moment of Constitutional stability and plain decorum for which it had yearned (save for the handful of post-bitter-enders who will probably insist that November's election was stolen the rest of their mortal lives). The performances by Lady Gaga, Amanda Gorman and Garth Brooks were all appropriate to the moment. The talk of unity and turning down the temperature may have been merely obligatory, but they had a calming effect.
But after the crowd, such as it was, dispersed, President Biden, as promised, came back up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Oval Office and served notice that his was going to be an unmistakably twenty-first-century Democrat agenda, steeped in identity politics, climate alarmism and disregard for the nation's economic health.
There was a stack of executive orders awaiting him and he dug right in.
He himself admitted that on some of the fronts, legislation will be needed to flesh out details.
Um, yeah.
I was gratified to see Mitch McConnell address this on the Senate floor, in a speech that struck a measured balance between an attitude of willingness and a firm assurance that Republican legislators would not gloss over areas of absolute disagreement, but rather forthrightly voice opposition to such measures that Biden has put forth.
More broadly speaking, is this now a permanent fixture of the federal-government landscape? Is it going to be an entrenched tradition for a new president to sign executive orders right after being sworn in, the net effect of which is to say, "I hereby render all the measures my predecessor took by executive order null and void"? So much that ought to be codified - or rejected - in the legislative branch, a lot of it with immediate and profound impact on Americans' daily lives, becomes a ping-pong ball bounced back and forth every four or eight years.
In any event, reversals were the order of the day.
In the immigration realm, three abrupt changes will be made to policies that, whether the Very Stable Genius truly grasped the real reason behind them or not, were about the rule of law and national sovereignty. In short, they were among the handful of policy moves the VSG got right. Biden has revoked the 2017 order that prioritized the arrest of illegal aliens. The "remain in Mexico" policy will now be reversed. Biden's administration will preserve the DACA program.
Then there's the disbanding of the 1776 Commission. No discussion of whether its scope or focus needed any reexamination,. Nope. Just pulling the plug on it.
Again, I'm pretty sure the Very Stable Genius, the historically illiterate non-reader that he is, did not grasp the full depth of what he was setting up with this commission. The bottom line, though, is that it was a good idea, especially one to get underway in such an inflamed year as 2020. It served as a corrective to the lie-filled and America-hating 1619 Project, which, like critical race theory and Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, has insinuated itself in the curricula of school systems across the country, poisoning impressionable young minds and deeply damaging the field of history as a scholarly endeavor.
It's understandable why Biden did it. He goes all in for the idea that there is still systemic racism in American society, and a commission like that doesn't contribute to that narrative.
No, the era now dawning is going to bring us diversity and inclusion on steroids.
Exhibit A is another one of Wednesday's executive orders, this one saying that people who "feel" like they're the sex opposite of what the DNA in every cell of their bodies makes clear that they are have "rights" - to use the public restrooms they "feel" like using, and to join sports teams designated for the sex opposite of the one their DNA tells us that they are.
This is another step, like the pronoun-usage laws in effect in various municipalities, toward making people indulge the delusion harbored by transgendered people, further distancing language and reality from one another.
He's even appointed such a person to be assistant HHS secretary. The photographs of this individual make clear that he's not fooling anybody. That's a dude with long, stringy hair.
Then there's the cancelling of the Keystone XL pipeline construction. Very stupid, on several fronts. It's a poke in the eye to our good neighbor to the north. Canada may at present have a soft-left government, but it is, as it always has been, in America's inner circle of allies. This move also throws thousands of skilled tradesmen out of work.
Democrats would rather you not think through the lack of logic in this move. Transporting oil by pipeline means you are not introducing the fossil-fuel exhaust of freight trains into the atmosphere. It's the clean way of getting it from Point A to Point B.
I made this move the subject of an entire LITD post the other day:
Lots of Canadians are not okay with this:
Former TC Energy executive Dennis McConaghy is not surprised the project is among the first decisions by the new administration.
"I have consistently said Biden would indulge in this rescinding of the permit immediately because it's something he has to do largely to follow through for expectations of his political base and many of his donors," McConaghy told CBC's Kyle Bakx on Sunday.
The decision would likely lead to disappointment in the Canadian oilpatch, even after so many other setbacks for the project over the last decade.
"Ideally the project should have been completed and put into operation during the Trump administration," McConaghy said. "It's a very audacious thing that is being done here by the Biden administration."
Kirsten Hillman, Canada's ambassador to the U.S., said in a statement sent to The Canadian Press that the pipeline expansion fits with Canada's climate plan.
"The Government of Canada continues to support the Keystone XL project and the benefits that it will bring to both Canada and the United States," she said.
"Not only has the project itself changed significantly since it was first proposed, but Canada's oilsands production has also changed significantly. Per-barrel oilsands GHG emissions have dropped 31 per cent since 2000, and innovation will continue to drive progress."
Jazz Shaw at Hot Air gets into some of the specific fronts on this would be a wrecking-ball move:
This move would cause significant damage to the stakeholders in the pipeline, leading to possible liabilities for the federal government. They played by the rules and jumped through all of the required hoops to obtain that permit and then began investing heavily in the work based on their belief in the good faith of the United States government. It’s not hard to imagine them going to court to recover their losses and finding judges amenable to the idea. That would leave the American taxpayers holding the bill for this fiasco.
Let’s not forget that large sections of the pipeline are already complete, including portions that cross the border. What happens to all of that pipeline? Will it just be left to rust or will the federal government attempt to force the pipeline’s owners to spend even more money to rip everything out?
As I mentioned above, there are literally tens of thousands of jobs on the line here, ranging from the workers who are directly engaged in the construction of the pipeline to all of the supporting industries that make such work possible. Joe Biden is signaling that he’s ready to come into office and evaporate a huge number of jobs “on day one.” Wasn’t he only recently complaining about the number of people who are already out of work because of the pandemic?
Somebody who holds elected office in the United States needs to speak the plain truth about energy policy, and not just once. It needs to be driven home repeatedly.
Dense and consistently available energy forms are by definition far less expensive than diffuse and intermittent forms. The latter are not viable in the marketplace without government subsidization. And it's fine to use the former all we want. It is not putting the global climate in peril.
The above paragraph needs to be stated emphatically in debates between candidates, on the House and Senate floors, in television appearances and in columns and articles.
The entire climate alarmism movement has been nothing but a nauseating exercise in preening and self-congratulation over how much it cares about humanity in general, the lives of actual individual human beings be damned.
Let us just hope that the pushback and court cases that arise from this shut down not the pipeline, but rather Biden's blatant assault on human advancement.
Rejoining the Paris climate agreement is a similar type of move. No country in the world is meeting the agreement's targets. China is approving new coal plants like there is no tomorrow. Even if every signatory nation did adhere to the letter, the effect on the global average temperature in 2100 would be negligible. All it does is erode national sovereignty and interfere with energy companies' right to determine what products to bring to market (and consumers' choices regarding what energy forms to consume).
Then there is the matter of the extermination of fetal Americans, something that it seems a self-described devout Catholic would not be cool with. Alas, it appears that the US will once again fund health organizations that are in that grisly business.
I can't say any of this surprises me in the least. Biden was portrayed as some kind of centrist when juxtaposed against Bernie Sanders, but the entire Democrat party has largely become a leftist enterprise in recent decades. (Ironically, the lone holdouts in the Senate, truly centrist if not slightly right-leaning Democrats such as Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, may have a certain kind of power to determine how far this agenda does or does not go, given the 50-50 makeup of that body at present.)
And it becomes incumbent on actual conservatives (Trumpists are not, or ought not to be, invited to participate in this discussion) to articulate their position on each and all of these matters in the most soundly reasoned, most consistent and coherent way possible, because a great many of those who disagree with us are going to try to go for the "you-worshippers-of-the-Orange-Man-had-your-day-your-views-are-part-of-that-failed-agenda" angle.
We have to be ready to say, "No, they're not. They go way back before the Trumpism infection beset our movement and they merit a ringing defense."
We know at the outset of the new era what the lay of the land is going to be. If Biden is devout in anything, it's being a Democrat, and he's "grown" with his party at every turn since 1972.
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